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"Small data". Never heard this term?

Submitted by jworkorg on Thu, 01/02/2014 - 10:55

We often hear the term "big data" (see "Big data" wikipedia link). Taking the path of finding cool words for description of something quite trivial (before we had "not quite big data", and in 10 years from now we will have "monstrously big data"?), how about a new term "small data"? The definition of "small data" is less ambiguous than for "big data": Data that has small enough size for human comprehension. About one quarter of the human brain is involved in visual processing, and the only way to comprehend "big data" is to reduce them to small, visually-appealing objects representing various aspects of large data sets or data "features" (histograms, describing data projections and relationships, charts, scatter plots) that can be understood by humans. SCaVis is one of such tools to do such transformations.
Perhaps, "small data" has something to do with "data mining", but data mining is a "process" of finding relationships and metadata, so "data mining" not quite "data".
See more discussion about "small data" in this blog. As somebody mentioned before, "big data" is about machines and small data is about people.

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